I’m sitting here with a mouthful of aches. About two hours ago, I got up from the dentist’s chair after a root canal. There’s still some anaesthetic in my mouth and what aches the most are my TMJs (jaw joints). It’s hard to keep your mouth open for 90 minutes.

Why did I need a root canal? Child Two (whom you see at right) is quite the baker, and she decided to make homemade snack bars. I guess you could call them granola bars, but they were mostly dried fruit and hazelnuts (that’s the other photo, left). I had a hunk and the stuff pulled out a filling on my rearmost top right molar. My tooth cracked and part of it went with the filling. The inside of my tooth had been infected, to the surprise of me and my dentist, so I need to have the root canal.

Despite the name, a root canal is the removal of all pulp from within the tooth and the root canals. The dentist uses these diode-like files to pull out all the living tissue.

The procedure was painless, after the needles in my palate. The right side of my face was frozen from eyelid to neck. The freezing is wearing off as I write this, and it’s starting to ache a bit. The dentist told me to take Advil for any subsequent pain, and I hope that’s sufficient. If not, I have my migraine stash to raid.

I have two weeks to wait before the broken molar gets a permanent fix.